I currently have two silver medals under my belt. Both of which came from the Ateneo Fiesta Quiz Bowl. Both of them have their own stories, but I'd like to tell the story of the second silver, which I won a few hours ago.
I prayed to God to give me a gold this year. Since I've been joining the QB for three years now, it only seems logical for the gold to go to my team. But the gold has been elusive from Nursing's clutches for quite some time now. I felt it, with ever fiber of my being, that today's the day my team of three would win the gold. Yes, it's a feeling, and the feeling was strong.
But screw the feeling when my team got there.
It was not, in all aspects, an easy feat. First of, we started out shaky during the easy round, fumbling over questions that really didn't belong in the easy round. Like, one of our answers said "Camarines Sur, Region 2" (Q: Where is Mt. Bulusan?) - to that effect.
When the top three teams were announced, My team and with two others (High school and Education), placed third...So the judges subjected us to a cruel "sudden death" Tie - Breaker round.
It wasn't sudden death, since the questions kept on going and going. Almost all the time, all of us either got it right or wrong! But lo and behold, High school was eliminated first, which left us and Educ.
And on and on went the "sudden death" questions, until the Lit round, where they asked us about Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. The question was about which sphere has men-in-arms supporting Christianity or something like that. We answered Mars, Educ answered Jupiter. We got it right, so we advanced!!!! and it felt so good - the adrenaline rush coupled with people cheering us on. That was our shining moment right there. We made it just by the skins of our teeth. We were kick-ass.
So The Big Three: Accountancy, CSIT and Nursing made it to the difficult round. I told my teammates that we thrived on difficult questions, and we didn't disappoint.
CSIT, the leading team during the easy round, was eliminated early on, so they automatically get third. Which left Nursing and Accountancy vying for the gold.
Yeah, another fight to the "Sudden Death". And the questions kept on coming I couldn't even remember some of them (answers ranged from Albino, Hyme, Charter 77 etc...), until we reached English.
The question asked the case of "We" in the sentence "We blah blah blah". Thanks to my MS Word assumption, I answered "Sentence Case" (you know, upper case, lower case, sentence case? LOL!!!), when the correct answer was "Nominative case" and Accountancy got it right so they won.
I admit I felt defeated after that, but I had the whole day to realize that it's not every day that you get to survive two sudden death rounds in a quiz bowl. And it's not every day that you knew the answers to questions you never thought you knew. We didn't get the gold, but the experience was priceless. I couldn't have asked for a better time with an amazing team to win a silver medal. And it's still shiny right?
Looking back, I may not have given Nursing a gold, but I think I proved to myself that we can put up a good fight, and if there's a chance to go down fighting, then let's take that chance. I'm proud of myself and my team. We had a moment during that quizbowl that made me feel that we were definitely kick-ass. And I'll look back at that crazy moment to remind myself that we did accomplish something amazing. And you can't place a medal on that. So I admit...Miley Cyrus was right.
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